Kim graduated magna cum laude from Phillips Exeter Academy and cum laude from Yale University. A realist painter, known professionally as C. P. Beaty, she studied at the National Academy of Design School of Fine Art in New York. Her mother, Mary Rodgers Guettel, is a composer and author. Her father,Julian B. Beaty, is a lawyer and her stepfather is the executive director of the Theater Development Fund in New York. She is a granddaughter of Dorothy Rodgers of New York, an author and philanthropist, and of the late Richard Rodgers, the composer and partner of the late Oscar Hammerstein 2d.